Education That Works

The Neuroscience of Building a More Effective Higher Education

James Stellar

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781940858265
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes expérimentales en éducation

The book addresses the issue of how college and university education can be made more impactful by incorporating a variety of experiential education activities and how this approach is natural given what we know today about how the brain works at multiple levels from modern brain scanners. The key point is that the brain operates on conscious and unconscious decision-making levels and that the latter is under appreciated in higher education but is well-suited to learning from direct experience in complement to the academic curriculum. Classic among these experiential activities is an internship, but also included are study abroad, undergraduate research, service-learning, and other activities that bring the student's classroom study into a more real-world project or operation in a way that allows them to apply what they are studying to what they might ultimately do with their college learning when they graduate. The book examines experiential activates from this perspective and looks at how they might be implemented in the university setting. For example, key among the programs is the use of reflection to better integrate these two types of decision-making and important among the impacts is an expected increase in retention and job/school placement after college.

C H A P T E R 1:

What Is Experiential Education?
An Answer in Three Stories

Experiential education is a broad term for a broad range of, well, experiences that help students learn about a subject from the perspective of doing, not just receiving knowledge and giving it back in the classroom. Common experiential education programs at the college and university level include student internships, study abroad, undergraduate research, service-learning, fieldwork, entrepreneurship and even some volunteer activities. The work-based internship form is practiced all over the world and sometimes is called by other names, such as work-integrated learning (WIL) or cooperative and work-integrated education (CWIE). Herman Schneider, the founder of the first work-education program in United States, called it cooperative education. His program was established at the University of Cincinnati, over 100 years ago, to focus particularly on internships. In 1926, he became the first president of the Association of Cooperative Colleges and his term of cooperative education is still widely used particularly in the United States and Canada.¹

We will return to definitions in the next chapter, but here I want to again make the point that I mentioned in the preface: All forms of experiential education tap into an often overlooked form of mental processing called unconscious decision-making, which occurs in an older part of our brain. Often we are aware of that processing only when we notice that a decision feels right, or alternatively, it feels like one has made a bad choice. We want this experience for our students, hopefully positive, while they are in college. We want to help them see the value of a chosen major, or to switch and find the one that is right for them. We want them to grow and develop into more mature learners who can fit into the workplace at graduation or seek even more education and know why they are doing it.

I also want to mention that experiential education often requires students to work in groups. The group approach delivers other important aspects of a quality higher education, such as developing teamwork skills that industry particularly prizes after graduation. Back on campus, when students develop true teamwork, and thereby shape and raise one another’s expectations, they become more interested in their subject and show a greater commitment toward completing their studies through to graduation.

Can universities design programs that make that kind of growth possible for students in college? How should administrators design them? What factors make them work, including those factors in our brains and behavior? How do we get students out of the ivory tower to do that, and how can the faculty create some of the same kinds of powerful opportunities within the ivory tower? This book will try to answer those questions. But, let’s start with a personal story.

A Story of Personal Transformation

I went to meet Mariko at the student union at Northeastern University late one winter afternoon. She was 21, a senior, and had to make what seemed like the most important decision of her life, and she had little time left to make it. She had been heavily involved in my behavioral neuroscience research laboratory as an undergraduate research assistant. I knew her well. I always thought of her as a nice kid and a gifted student. At that moment, she was under tremendous pressure.

It is not accurate to say Mariko was my student and leave it at that. Northeastern University has a cooperative education program where students can take a six-month full-time work period interspersed with full-time study, and do that three times in a five-year undergraduate degree program. Mariko did it all, and while she started working in my laboratory group as a freshman volunteer, her first cooperative education experience was at Boston University Medical School. There she worked on problems of neural differentiation, that is, how cells become nerve cells. Her second co-op was with me where she worked on research studying the way the nerve cells in the brains of laboratory animals change with cocaine exposure. Her third co-op was at Children’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, with a professor friend of mine from the days when I was an assistant professor in Harvard’s psychology department. There she worked on neural regeneration. Each of these experiences resulted in a scientific paper. Mariko had also studied abroad in Australia, and even did some neuroscience research there.

This rich pattern of full-time lab work that alternated and intertwined with class-based study and part-time volunteer lab work led to her phenomenal growth as a student and a researcher. All of her professors saw it, and it was fascinating that she seemed not to. But that day, she was forced to confront what she had become—one of the best students in America—and decide between her admission offers to Stanford and Harvard medical schools. And she was out of time.

To a casual observer, Mariko’s embarrassment of riches was a win-win situation. But she reminded me of an illustration in one of my old psychology textbooks of a donkey standing exactly between two delectable bales of hay. Lightning bolts are shooting out of its head, while the donkey wears a distressed expression on its face. As I remember, the caption read, “Approach-approach conflict can be stressful, too.” Indeed, over the few weeks leading up to her medical school decision, I actually felt sorry for Mariko for the stress she was under, even as I was enormously proud of her for earning the choice between two highly positive alternatives.

Adding to the pressure was the fact that she had been admitted into nearly every medical school to which she applied. Mariko had exceeded everyone’s expectations, including her own. Students outside the Ivy League were not supposed to achieve such heights. A few years later, when Mariko was at Stanford Medical School, she flattered me by saying, “Jim took a dumb girl from western Massachusetts and got her into the best medical schools in America.” Nice words, but of course Mariko did it herself; she was a good student who really developed herself in college. I believe that experiential education helped her to do that.

I believe it can help everyone. You see, Mariko was not alone. I had passing through my laboratory many undergraduate students who thought of themselves as having good but ordinary levels of student talent. Just like me when I was their age, they did not get into an Ivy League undergraduate school. But they achieved beyond their expectations at Northeastern. In the last six years before I left Northeastern University in 2008, those laboratory undergraduates were admitted into top medical schools: one, who actually preceded Mariko, into Stanford; two into Yale; one into NYU; and one into the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary program. The same thing happened with another set of lab students who went on to prestigious PhD programs in neuroscience, receiving generous fellowships from Harvard, MIT, UCSD, and so on. Success was in the air, or maybe in the water, in that laboratory. Just as Mariko had grown at Northeastern, I could see others grow from their experiences, their success evident in their faces and in their increased efforts as they realized they were getting somewhere.

Some people thought I was able to create this success because I was the laboratory director. I did not. I was in the laboratory less and less at that point, as I had become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. To me, the key factor was that the laboratory was a team. Every person, from professor to graduate student, to undergraduate to technician, brought their best efforts to support that team. I was the principal investigator, true—the official leader—but the lab belonged to all of us. We were like a family that owned the corner grocery store in a small town. We knew we had to work together, and we inspired one another.

At night or on weekends, while many of their peers were studying, socializing, or goofing off, my undergraduates were often in the lab working on experiments. Without my asking, they sometimes ran experiments over holidays. I could see when they were working, if only from the times they sent me text messages asking for the location of some supplies, or e-mails wondering whether they should re-run a procedure that had a result that seemed a little screwy. We all seemed to be having fun; I know that I had a blast. We all grew together. It was work, but it did not feel burdensome.

A Story of an Institution that Transformed Itself

Experiential learning has also played a key role in transforming a university at which I served for 22 years, at which I had a front-row seat to watching and helping.

For a large, private university, Northeastern is somewhat of an anomaly. Most of Boston’s major colleges and universities are ivory towers steeped in traditional pedagogies of the library and lecture hall. Northeastern specializes in cooperative education, a style that combines carefully selected and designed work experiences with standard classroom and lab courses. It has done so for over 100 years, following the University of Cincinnati, one of the founding schools of the cooperative-education approach.

At the beginning of my time as dean, I attended a retreat for Northeastern’s top administrators, with our president, Richard Freeland, who was also new to the job. He had us read in advance Jim Collins’ book on how businesses improve, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don’t. At the time, Northeastern was rated by US News & World Report as a third-tier school in America, about 165 on the list of major national universities. Freeland made a quiet call to arms, telling us that with the coming competition in American higher education, as he saw it, Northeastern would be better off it were ranked in the top 100. As his leadership team, we agreed that we could make things better.

To be honest, there was another factor at work. Northeastern had just come through a painful period of campus budget cuts, and it was rough despite able leadership by the previous president. The cuts stemmed from a demographic dip in the college-age population that led the other Boston-area colleges to take more students from their waiting lists. Our problem was that many of those students would have been ours, and we had no real waiting list. Our freshman class size plummeted in one year from about 4,500 to 2,700 students. As a private university, we had few options when our revenue coffers ran dry. We had no state government to back us up. The endowment was not large. That year, we fired well over 100 people because we simply couldn’t afford to pay their salaries. We cut back on everything else, too, to live within a budget and the new reality of a smaller freshman class. Just about the time we had gotten used to these changes, stability returned, and President Freeland arrived. Now he wanted us to get better. We all agreed that we wanted never to repeat the trauma of downsizing. To be less vulnerable, we wanted to have a healthy waiting list and a better national ranking. We decided to pursue those goals by promoting both our traditional academic excellence and our signature and distinctive program of cooperative education.

The college of arts and sciences I was leading had also come to the same basic conclusion of pursuing a program of experiential education. In fact, a few years earlier, when I was the associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences under then-dean Robert Lowndes, we had developed and passed a plan to require experiential education of all students by the year 2000. We designed the college requirement around Northeastern’s model of cooperative education, but added features of service-learning, undergraduate research, and study abroad that better suited a liberal arts and sciences college rather than a professional school. Also, we reasoned that having more things for a student to do would more easily allow the students to complete the new requirement. What I did not know at the time or see then as clearly as I see now, was that we were helping to invent the rich panoply of activities that we now call experiential education.

Freeland’s plan to raise the university’s reputation and attract more students would need a marketing component. We settled on a branding campaign. The campaign chose the key phrases of higher education and richer experience, which were advertised in signs on campus and on billboards in nearby cities. The ideas appeared in picture form as well. For example, one billboard showed a photograph of student raising his hand in class next to another photograph of the same student hand-signaling a bid at the stock exchange. Another poster featured a student holding one leg of a human skeleton in a classroom, with the professor looking on from behind, while the adjacent scene showed the same student on a football field holding the leg of a player with the coach standing behind him. My favorite poster showed a photograph of a professor at the blackboard lecturing to a class. A female student sat in the front row, her blond hair spilling out from under a baseball cap. In the picture beside it, the curve the professor was drawing on the chalkboard continued as the vapor trail of a space shuttle blasting off across the sky. In that second scene, the blond female student’s baseball cap displayed the logo of an aerospace company that worked with NASA. We ended up not using that one after the Challenger space shuttle explosion, but I thought it made the connection particularly well between classroom learning and experience.

The branding campaign was a major effort. Northeastern’s enrollment management office identified cities outside the Boston region where we had alumni. With the development staff, they coordinated the posting of advertising with alumni events. Such campaign tactics were smart, but the bottom line, to me, was that we had something good to sell: a wide and deep dedication to a different model of education combining intensive, experience-based learning with academic scholarship in the classroom.

Northeastern made other changes, too, transforming itself from a commuter school with only a few dormitories into a largely residential school that housed most, if not all, students who wanted to live on campus. As new residence halls and parking garages went up, the open spaces in between were transformed and landscaped. The university changed its feel from parking lot to park.

The real driver of success, I believe, was selling the cooperative education program. I saw that especially in the College of Arts and Sciences, where it was unusual, as most cooperative education programs were in professional schools. At student recruitment events, we boasted that 70 percent of our students received job offers, either at graduation or in the summer just afterward, and that many of those job offers were from coop employers or other companies in the same industry. We also noted that many of our graduates were declining those job offers to attend medical, law, business, engineering, or other graduate schools. It seemed to me to be powerful stuff for prospective applicants—and it showed in the results.

Gradually at first, Northeastern’s applicant pool grew larger. The yield of accepted students began to get stronger and we started to notice more and more students choosing us over what were then better ranked schools, like Boston University. The applicant pool kept growing.

During that time, I was appointed dean, and at just at the college I led, applications for 1,100 freshman places climbed from about 5,000 to 15,000. The average SAT scores of the incoming freshman class rose by about 250 points. Our retention of students improved, too, and the number of students who graduated with a major in one of the departments or programs in arts and sciences grew from about 3,700 to 6,800 students. The growing size made the College of Arts and Sciences a strong revenue generator for the university, generating millions of dollars each year beyond what was targeted for us. That fact was a great relief to those of us who remembered the budget-cut days.

When I became dean, one of the college’s professors told me that he always thought the job of the dean’s office was to make his regular classes more like his honors classes. When I stepped down as dean, he stopped by my office and said we had succeeded. He was incredulous and happy. His everyday classes felt to him like the honors classes of old. I saw it too. Working with the departments, I found that our academic success was making it easier to recruit professors who had strong research backgrounds. Faculty members wanted to be part of an institution with a reputation that was on its way up.

In November 2010, after I left Northeastern, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an article on institutions that sought to improve their reputations. It cited Northeastern, along with USC, Boston University, NYU, and Drexel, as examples of institutions that had done it. By then, Northeastern was booking one of the largest applicant pools of all private universities in America. Moving from a ranking that would charitably be called “undistinguished” to being discussed as a model of achievement was a heady ride.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that the College of Arts and Sciences was wholly responsible for Northeastern’s ascent, but I have no doubt that it contributed. Likewise, I cannot prove that cooperative education and the larger experiential education program was responsible for this bright chapter of Northeastern’s story. As a scientist, I know that we did not do a random-assignment experiment, or even have a control group of a comparable university that made similar improvements but without an experiential-learning program. But as an administrator, I believe that experiential education was central to Northeastern’s rise. As a dean and a professor who employed undergraduate research students, I saw how it contributed to the growth of our students. Our successful students like Mariko could attest to the importance of experiential education to their success, and they did. In fact, they became the best promoters of Northeastern. The best promotion is word of mouth from trusted peers, and Northeastern had it with students and even with professors whom we sought to recruit.

My Story

When I decided to write this book, I made a number of decisions. The first one was writing style. When I began my graduate training in neuroscience, I had to read a mountain of technical scientific literature that other scientists knew and followed every day. I also had to learn how to write for them. They were the professors on my graduate committees, editors at the journals in which I needed to publish, and reviewers of my grant applications for the necessary funding to do the research. The value in that community was on being succinct, precise, and utterly clear to the expert. In science, we rarely explained the exact path we took to get to the final design of the experiment. That was not to be deceptive. It was done to save words. Scientists are busy people. At scientific meetings and particularly after the conference day at dinners and in the bars with friends we would discuss how many ways we tried a technique to make it work before we found the right method. The important thing in writing was clarity.

I really liked the stripped-down, scientific writing style and I thought it helped me as an administrator to cut through any crap and get to the point. But I wanted broad accessibility in this book, so I took a stiff drink and decided to do something simple. I decided I would just talk to you, the reader, as though you were a dear, old friend from outside the field and we were having a nice conversation over dinner, a very long conversation at that.

Another decision I made long ago was to value collaboration, particularly with those who are coming up in the growth process. Despite competition between laboratories in science, I found that I could do well as a researcher by working with students as colleagues and with colleagues as friends. I have tried to apply this same thinking to my time in university administration and it seems to work. People like it, they work hard, and they bring forward their best ide...